I walk down Eastgate, and cross Regents Street, towards the back road down to the bus station.
It’s a grey October, and I’m porous to this greyness. Any deeper colours are reserved to the warm cosy culture of comedown 90s TV. It’s like the decade has put its winter coat and gloves on – taking a break from its hedonism.
Yet, down here, right now, it remains a distant promise of ‘ok-ness incorporated’, which I do sincerely expect the coming Millennium to deliver.
I have the line from a pop song in my head. As is always the case. With every coming month, sometimes every week, a lyric from a song with enough airplay to pursue you will proceed to momentarily define what you’re going through.
#Nothing really matters. Nothing really matters.
The lyric delivers legitimacy to what I really want to do: resign.
I’m too young to resign. Yet I want to. I want to resign, and retreat for the bright lights of having to show up, of being a body that must compete. I want to hide in the big cosy coat that 1999 has promised, until the world changes and it’s ok to come out into a less abrasive daylight.
Nothing is fun. Everything is routine. Routine is the coping strategy. Restrictive eating habits.
Nothing to excess, except exercise that is. Routine keeps me protected from internal condemnation but not from external exposure.
I’m 2 weeks through work experience. I was part of a group who got sent on a college construction training site. None of us fit in with this life role, but this has been dealt as a kind of punishment for what, in 2023, could be seen as a group of teenagers with ADHD.
It’s been 2 of the longest weeks of my 15 year old life. I’ve become the target for the boredom and displeasure from the rest of my group.
In the 2020s, the language I’m about to use would sound like I’m victim blaming myself. But, Somehow I’ve allowed this to be. Somewhere along the line, I’ve learnt how to be the whipping boy.
Perhaps I deserve it, perhaps it’s part of larger narrative I have that develops this relationship dynamic with other folk my age.
Perhaps it’s part of a story I’m developing where I HAVE to be the ‘good person’, and in order to maintain innocence in an already consumer-weighted world where one is inherently complicit, one must thus become a victim.
Who knows where it all began? The story feels like a thinly-vieled one of Christian reward.
“Once this new Millennium comes, and I leave school, the threats will dissapate and I can finally ‘be myself.”
“I have done well, I haven’t indulged, I haven’t been bad, so I DESERVE my reward, of nice easy life and beautiful woman.”
The seemingly innocent seeds of this relation to what the world is what it owes me will come back to bite me one day, surely…
However, the atmosphere of the moment tells me I’m in my right to feel this way.
The whole culture is autumnal, not just the weather. The whole culture feels like a solemn walk around a duck pond and a bench with a grown up Ronan Keating.
“Indie bedwetting” music is in vogue. It’s the age of feeling sorry for yourself with impunity. It sets an unfortunate precedent of expectations of an easier world to come on the eve of a new Millennium.
With a sense of relief I get on the bus by myself, still young and unknown enough in this town to feel safely anonymous.
I’m happy to resign from 1999. I’ll sit this one out now, please.
I won’t be prepared for this new Millennium for another 20 years.
John B Ledger 